34 comments:

I wish Penelope knew what it's like to sweep up pubic hairs of other women from the bed every time she comes back from her very important book tours because she would know who is a demon and who is not cute and fun with his wife.

There is no way that you can raise eight children that close in age. People used to have big families but they had them one or at most two at a time so when there was 8, the oldest ones were old enough to help raise the youngest ones.

If you don't believe in abortion, you have no business taking fertility treatments. It is irresponsible and unfair to your kids to have a litter of children.

Worse still, it is wrong to whore your kids out to TV to make a living. Who ever asked those kids if they wanted their entire childhoods broadcasted to the world so their parents could get rich?

Kate Gosselin is a freak and a media whore of the worst sort. I am really sorry that I sadly have to know who she is.

From everything I've read...Kate was a royal pain. She essentially had a contract that said her husband could see other women on the side, as long as it was quite and didn't effect their meal ticket - the show. Her parents and former babysitter do not have kind words about her either.

I don't have issue with her going off and leaving him, while she was on a book tour, because if it was reverse, there wouldn't be an issue.

I also think having kids is not a solution to helping marriage...not sure if their marriage was hurting back then, but that many kids can't help but hurt the marriage.

These two people -- I don't watch their show -- have lives so far removed from mine, that it's hard to comment. But I'll try.

I think her crumbling marriage -- their crumbling marriage -- would have a better chance of survival if they weren't on TV every week. The marriage isn't working out because that's what life is like. The marriage isn't working out because the TV cameras are there all the time.

Saves money: no drawn out custody proceedings; no returning to court every time one party wants to [insert lifestyle choice unobjectionable by a rational person].

Saves sanity: both parents are spared the insanity brought about by the children playing one parent against the other.

Increases liberty: without adverse parties, there can be no court proceedings; without court proceedings (that is, without a meddling court of equity judge bent on imposing his own deranged view of the home) both parties are free to live their lives and parent in the way they see fit.

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But of course no one will go for this because it's unthinkable that anyone would apply economic (i.e., rational) thought to her relationship with her children.

The last people protected in a Divorce today are the children. Apparently children do not vote enough to get any respect. Every selfish thing the two parents do is "for the children" in words only. Really, divorce is always to please the adults.The custody sharing arrangements now in vogue are a torture of the kids, but nobody cares at all.

My wife and I tried to watch a couple of episodes of the show, but we had to turn it off. What came through the screen was:

a) Kate loves her celebrity life, and she's willing to climb over a pile of dead bodies to get in front of a camera.b) Jon is extremely disengaged from the family who would rather be left alone than be on the show.c) The children have no semblance of a "normal" life, and that they're being shamelessly used as an income for their parents.

On top of that, it's been made public that:

a) Jon and Kate actually split up some time ago. They kept it quiet to have a ratings bonanza for a season premiere.b) The accusations of Jon straying are unfounded. The split occurred long ago: his "crime" was being seen acting like it before it was made public. Kate has done the same with her "bodyguard."c) The state child services are looking into whether they have broken child labor laws by filming the children non-stop for hours on end each day.

I only know who that is thanks to Joel McHale on "The Soup" running with the 'Jon Minus Nine' joke nearly a year ago.

I will grant that there's a selectivity bias to my knowledge of the show (clips that make one of them look bad = schadenfreude)....but I'm amazed anyone could stay with Kate long enough to have 8 kids, much less a reality show. It doesn't condone either of them breaking marriage vows, and it does amaze me that both of them would agree to make a show that makes them both look that horrible.

"The custody sharing arrangements now in vogue are a torture of the kids, but nobody cares at all."

I'm in favor of the parents having to pay for a court-appointed child advocate in all divorce proceedings. That way the children would have a voice at the table, and there would be someone legally responsible for making sure that their interests were protected.

"That way the children would have a voice at the table, and there would be someone legally responsible for making sure that their interests were protected."

Isn't that the judge? If the parents care more about themselves than they do their kids, no amount of advocacy is going to change much. Divorce is not something to be encouraged. At the same time, however, I know plenty of children of divorced parents (who were mature and cared about their kids) who had better childhoods than kids whose parents stayed together but were unhappy and at war with each other.

Horace: my mother forced such an arrangement on my dad when they divorced. And all I got to show for it was therapy at 35. No thanks.

Kate Gosselin is some kind of Gen X super hero? My childbearing-enlarged a** she is! The vast majority of 30-something moms who don't get divorced, don't whore their children, stay home, work overtime - do all those things that need to be done, in other words - are the heroes. I agree with Ms. Trunk that Gen X women seem to be balancing work, marriage and kids in pretty unique and successful ways (from my own observation this seems to be true, anyway) but I don't think that is true of a media Hoover like Kate Gosselin.

I used to watch the show. In the earlier years, the episodes I saw were sort of interesting in a "whoa, how do these people manage to raise all these kids" kind of way. And it was clear that in the first couple of years, they weren't living high on the hog. The husband still went to work, she was talking about budgeting, saving money, etc. My son watched it last year and the episodes I saw were very different from the earlier years. Suddenly they were going on trips and the themes seemed to be, "watch as Kate and Jon manage to corral 8 kids while _____-ing!" Fill in the blank - skiing, beachcombing, traversing Disney World, etc. All the stuff they could only afford because the tv people were picking up the tab.

I think young women should watch that show and learn a lesson - don't treat your husband like a hired hand. Don't demean him in the middle of a store, order him around, and act as though he's just another one of the kids. And men, don't allow yourselves to be treated that way! There's nothing Gen X about that lesson. That's more of a Greatest Generation lesson.

I have friends who tried the three-house method of divorce -- that is, the kids stay in the marital home while Mom and Dad take turns moving in and out. It was well-intentioned but it didn't last long. There was the problem of affording three homes on an income that had recently covered only one, and also, there was the problem of neither adult knowing where "home" was. Before too long, they got sick of it and shifted the problem to their kids by going to week-to-week shared custody.

The first time I saw the family was years ago on a different show including a variety of multiples. My immmediate response was that the two of them didn't seem to like each other much and none of the commercials I have seen have changed my mind on that score.